The latest government intervention into the capitalist system is the move by the UK and U.S. governments to ban short-selling of all financial stocks outright.
In the wake of the severe market turbulence unleashed by the failure of Lehman Brothers, the government has decided to insert itself into the marketplace and prop up share prices by [...]

National City is one of the regionals under the greatest pressure and scrutiny. This Friday afternoon announcement has to make deposit- and shareholders alike very nervous.

National City Corp., Ohio’s largest bank, said the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission started an informal probe into the company’s lending and the sale of its subprime [...]

As an unofficial Eurosceptic, I always view EU power grabs through a lens of distrust. Now, the EU is looking to increase its power by further regulating financial markets. But, the heavy-handiness of the regulation surely will be counterproductive.
The regulation backlash due to the credit crunch is obviously taking hold in Europe and [...]

The old adage goes that on a Parents Day, a class of children brought their parents in to school. A few parents got up in front of the class to explain what they did for a living. One woman was a firefighter. One man was a baseball player. Another parent was a doctor.
Over [...]

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes in today’s Telegraph of the BIS annual report, which is unusually cautious about the global economy. His article makes for sobering reading.
Bill White, the departing chief economist at the BIS, in writing his last annual report before departure. has warned that this financial crisis is the worst since the Great Depression [...]

I was reading Barron’s 2008 Midyear 2008 Roundtable just yesterday when a comment by Marc Faber struck me. He said that Obama is “not going to be good for the market.” He expects Barack Obama to win in November and for the investment markets to suffer as a result. Although I support Obama, I [...]

Mish over at the Global Economic Trend Analysis caught a story in the FT about the possibility of banks being forced to put $5 trillion back on their balance sheets.
The FT article says:
Accounting changes could force U.S. banks to take thousands of billions of dollars back on to their balance sheets in the coming months [...]

This past week, I attended an Investment luncheon to hear Greg Valliere, the chief political strategist with the Stanford Washington Research Group. He had a number of important things to say regarding the economic implications of political decision-making in Washington and of this year’s U.S. presidential election. I agree with most of his [...]